Three Behaviors That Could Negatively Impact Your Mobility Role

I have been lucky to work with hundreds of mobility professionals over the course of my career as a US immigration legal services manager. I have also been called upon by several corporate clients to help document and improve their mobility functions, which often includes interviewing the personnel across their organizations that touch US immigration. In doing this work, I have noted three common behaviors that may negatively impact an employer’s assessment of its mobility function: Resisting, Gatekeeping, and Siloing.

RESISTING

Many, if not most, modern-day employers are in a process of technological transformation and almost all are at least asking the question “What can AI do for me?” I have seen mobility professionals that both embrace and resist this type of change in their function and day-to-day work. Those that resist are negatively impacted in their career in two major ways. First, they gain a reputation for being a blocker to achieving the company’s goals. Rather than being seen as a thought leader or effective manager, they are seen as outdated or incapable of change. Second, they waste energy that could be redirected into thinking critically and proactively about what their future role could look like once all of the changes are implemented. 

Technology evolves and the march of change is ever forward, even considering temporary delays or setbacks. When an employer decides on a pathway to transformation, I have rarely if ever seen that get successfully derailed and especially not by specific individuals. While it may seem obvious, the more time one spends trying to avoid or reject the evolution of technology in their role, the less time they are spending thinking about what their value-add could be in both change management and in a new world where the changes have already occurred.

A good rule of thumb for all of us, myself and my attorney colleagues included, is to ask “What are the most human elements of my job?” Therein lies a lot of the answers around how our roles can evolve to continue to be critical even where AI has increased in usage. Relationship building, relationship management, change management, strategy, data analysis application, and policy development are just a few areas where the human touch is still critical.

Also, transformation means change management - there is space for us all to increase our visibility and focus on change management so that transformation can progress both quickly and safely. Be proactive, be creative, and be strategic, and your organization is more likely to see you in a positive light and as having long-term value to the mobility function before, during and after the transformation has occurred.

GATEKEEPING

Gatekeeping is akin to the game Telephone, which many of us played as children and which can be truly hilarious when it isn’t in the workplace context. It funnels all parties through a single team or individual rather than connects them directly with each other, which means information must be relayed between multiple parties in different conversations. Mobility professionals who insist on speaking on behalf of the business and the experts - as opposed to those who think of effective and innovative ways to connect the business directly with the experts - risk being seen as a communication roadblock or, worse, a layer of added bureaucracy that the business has to go through in order to gain the information it needs to make good decisions. 

Further, gatekeeping makes the mobility professional solely responsible for the timeliness and accuracy of the information being shared. It puts unnecessary pressure on the mobility function to be the “source of truth” when that team may or may not have direct access to the data underlying that truth. Lastly, gatekeeping is inefficient because it necessarily results in the dreaded duplication of efforts. Where a decision could be made after one conversation, it can take a gatekeeper three, four, a dozen conversations to achieve the same result.

Being a connector rather than a gatekeeper can feel counterintuitive. I think people often ask themselves “If I directly connect two parties that are not me or my team then what is my role?” That is not the right viewpoint - you are the relationship builder and the relationship manager. You are the escalation point. You are the internal resource who knows where all other parts of your organization need to go to get what they need. You are the innovator who thinks up and implements new tools that make communication easier and faster and then you are the owner of those tools. You are the communication disseminator - you create new channels and approaches to information sharing. None of these key activities involve forcing communication through you. Be the bridge and not the mote!

SILOING

Mobility is naturally cross-functional because “mobility” means many things - relocation, immigration, tax, rewards, talent acquisition, policy, etc. When mobility professionals approach their function in a silo, they do two things that negatively impact their career growth. First, they fail to build relationships across the organization and are often unknown to their colleagues in other functional areas. Second, they can be perceived by others as unhelpful or even trigger interpersonal conflicts where different functions see a particular policy, decision, or action item as the other’s responsibility.

Let’s take Talent Acquisition and Mobility as a common example of functions that really need to work in an integrated manner rather than as silos. Talent Acquisition is responsible for sourcing the right talent for their internal clients. They are concerned with quality, efficiency, payscale and the feedback from their business line leaders. Talent Acquisition needs mobility expertise in the application of the organization’s immigration, tax and relocation policy (to the extent the employer has written policies in these areas, which is a whole other topic!) and in correctly and timely relaying immigration, tax and relocation costs and timelines to the hiring managers. 

Likewise, Mobility needs Talent Acquisition in two major ways: 1. To timely loop Mobility into a new hire so that they don’t come into a talent acquisition scenario already behind schedule; and 2. To support immigration-related labor market tests and, to a lesser extent, market wage studies.

The mobility professional who thinks in terms of “not my job” will generally be seen less favorably than the one who thinks in terms of “how can I help”. Further, when a siloed mobility professional needs support from their colleagues across other functions, they will often face resistance or silence. Last but not least, when it comes time for the employer to undergo a transformation and they ask HR, Rewards, Talent Acquisition, Legal, and Lines of Business about the mobility function, the feedback could be negative or even non-existent (no one knowing who your team is or what they do on a day-to-day basis can be just as threatening to the mobility function’s longevity as negative feedback). Transparency and partnership lead to further integration within the organization and that, in turn, only opens up more opportunities as the mobility function evolves.

FINAL NOTE: The above behaviors are not going to impact major market, geopolitical and economic changes. Depending on where your employer is in their growth cycle, the merit a mobility professional brings and the positive impact they have on their organization may not be appreciated at that moment. Reductions in force, reorganizations, M&A activity, budget limitations, and changes in the regulatory landscape can all have a negative impact on our careers, no matter how much value we add. I say this as a reminder that job changes happen for a variety of reasons and we should always know our own worth and that it is not defined by our job role.